free toys

It appears that Microsoft is giving away its Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 compiler for free — probably as a move to get deeper penetration of its .NET amongst the free and open source community, sniping at Java as well as projects out to displace Microsoft such as DotGNU. All Microsoft would have to do at this point is port the VC++ Toolkit 2003 to Linux and release a free CLR for Linux, and DotGNU is as good as dead, and Java could be in deep trouble.